Microsoft pulls PDF publishing from Vista

In Construction Collaboration Technologies: The Extranet Evolution, I talked about file formats and the increasingly common practice of publishing drawings and other documents in the Adobe PDF format. That trend may be about to change, with another document format just over the horizon.

At AECnew.com, Randall Newton says: "the ability to publish directly to PDF format from within Microsoft Office 2007 has been removed from the about-to-ship beta version of the popular productivity suite. The removal of the software was at the request of Adobe, and seems to be a reflection of a relationship gone sour between the two firms."

In his analysis, he suggests an immediate beneficiary might be Autodesk’s DWF format, with Microsoft also rumoured to be developing a competing page description language code-named ‘Metro’ which will ship as part of the forthcoming Vista (nee Longhorn) operating system.